Foxfire 4

Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977. Softcover. Very Good in printed wraps with straight spine, tight binding and clean pages.. 8vo. 6" x 8.25." 512 pp. First edition. Anchor Press Edition, published simultaneously in hard and softcover. Cover design by Jim McWilliams. Well illustrated with photos and line drawings. Water Systems, Fiddle Making, Logging, Gardening, Sassafras Tea, Wood Carving, and Further Affairs of Plain Living.ÊEliot Wigginton was working as a teacher in rural Georgia trying to motivate his high school English class students, the children of descendants of the original, self-sufficient mountain people of Appalachia, who were distracted by the constant demands of their rural lifestyle and saw little practicality in higher education. Wigginton tasked the students with a journalism project interviewing their neighbors and named the resulting magazine "Foxfire" after a local glowing fungus. The students interviewed their neighbors not about the war in Vietnam or the recent moon landing, but about what they knew best: How to butcher a hog, how to birth a child, how to make soap or how to build a log cabin, along with non-essentials like moonshining and witchcraft. The practical and tough-minded Appalachians had successfully preserved their isolated mountain culture in their everyday tasks. In 1972, the very popular "Foxfire" magazines [9 million copies were sold in the first 10 years] was first compiled into a hardcover book which continues to this day in specialized editions. The "Foxfire" books are valued for being at the forefront of the artisanal and Green Movement and as a valuable sociological concept for studying the unique and diverse traditions of the United States. First published in 1972, The Foxfire Book was a surprise bestseller that brought Appalachia's philosophy of simple living to hundreds of thousands of reader through The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center that had a contact who could teach you how with clear, step-by-step instructions.